Chip Klose: Keeping Up with the Demands of your Audience
Chip Klose: Keeping Up with the Demands of your Audience
Your audience is the whole reason you’re setting up a marketing plan. There would be no point in setting up a campaign if no one sees it and your audience doesn’t engage with it. This is why it’s important to ensure your strategies are put in place to engage your audience. You’ll see an increase in interactions, leads, and a lot of growth when you meet the demands of your customers. They are needed to be kept top of mind all the time.
We got talking to Chip Klose, who has a lot of experience in helping businesses with their marketing plans and knows the importance of your audience. Not everyone’s audiences will have the same demands, so you need to realize this and put this in place with your campaign.
Therefore, in today’s Rediscover Marketing, we’ll be discussing how to improve audience interaction and ways to engage your audience. Alongside this, we’ll provide you tips on building the foundations of your marketing plan with Chip’s insights.
Who is Chip Klose?
Chip Klose has been working in the restaurant industry for 20 years in both operations and marketing. Between 2016-2017 he leveraged his network, skills, and experience and used it to create his own agency - Chip Klose Creative.
Chip Klose Creative is a hospitality consulting firm where Chip does one-on-one coaching and all-in-one marketing consulting for restaurant clients. The company focuses on small to medium-sized restaurants. Chip stated that these restaurants spend so much time in the business that they don’t have enough time to work on their business, and that’s where he comes in. Many people realized they didn’t have a system in place, which made the last year the busiest time for Chip Klose Creative.
The Foundations of a Marketing Plan
A marketing plan is crucial in keeping your audience engaged, and that’s why you need to work from the bottom upwards and create a strong foundation. Chip says that when he talks to clients, he’s always going on about the basics. However, a lot of people don’t want to listen to the basics because the first five steps to building a marketing plan aren’t particularly interesting.
If you want to engage your audience, Chip stated you need a strong foundation on the first five steps of your marketing plan to do the rest of the work. In his job, he can’t provide the answers for his clients, but Chip knows how to ask the right questions to help guide them. He continued to say that it’s not his business, it’s theirs, and it has to be their vision.
Chip continuously recommends the same thing to his clients, to follow the first five crucial steps to build a foundation. He has found that those who’s listened have found more success in their marketing plans. Chip believes over the last while, the success of his advice validated his thinking, and he’s doubled down on that. He continues to suggest this to his clients and tells them that the people who have listened and put in the hard work have come out on top.
Below are some foundations you can put in place when starting your own marketing plan:
- Find out who your customers are
Understanding your customers is crucial when putting together a marketing plan. If you don’t have a good idea of your target audience, your marketing campaign could be a complete failure. In order to learn about who your customers are and what they want, you need to ask the right questions instead of hypothetical questions. If you’re only just starting up and don’t have many customers to gain insights from, there are many resources out there to use. You can have a look at online reports, insights via trends and conferences.
- Examine where your business is at
When you know who your customers are, you need to then examine the stage at which your business is at. If you’re a start-up company, you’re going to want to see where your business sits in the industry and market sector. You can do this by having a look at the number of businesses in your sector, how many employees they have, their earnings, and other things like that. You’ll be able to see your market values, market potential, and opportunities to grow. A recommended strategy to use for this is to use a SWOT analysis.
You also want to have a look at what competitors are doing and see how you compare to them. Always keep an eye out for what they’re doing and try and be one step ahead of them.
- Create a forecast for the future
Having a vision of where you want to go in your business will help you when setting up your marketing plan. Instead of focusing purely on numbers, try to create objectives that hold more value. A good model to use for this is the SMART objectives. It allows you to look at your business as a whole and what you want it to achieve in the future, rather than just looking at sales. Some objectives to consider from the SMART model are your sales, customer service, communication, efficiency, and uniqueness. This allows you to set specific goals for different topics instead of generalization.
- Segment your audience
You are most likely going to want to get the attention of as many customers as possible. You can do this by segmenting your customer base into smaller groups and then targeting them using specific strategies. For example, you won’t use the same platforms and methods if you were to target a B2C customer base compared to B2B. It’s recommended to use the SUPERB mnemonic to help identify different customer segments. SUPERB stands for size (is your segment a large enough market to target separately?), unique (is your segment vastly different from the others?), profits (will your profits exceed the cost of marketing for this segment?), easy access (can you get access to this segment?), reaction (will your segment react well to your marketing?), and benefits (what benefits will your segment need?).
- Develop an action plan
You’ve now set a lot of foundations for your plan, and now it’s time to take action. You need to know what you’re going to do to reach each segment of your customer base and how it will help you stand out amongst your competitors. You may not be able to do every action yourself, so you can put specific tasks into the hands of others. You’ll want to include as much detail as possible, stating who is going to do the work alongside a due date. See the action plan as a list of instructions for the person who’s completing the job. You can always enlist help from an admin team, freelancers, or an agency if you cannot do it all yourself.
Focusing on your Audience
Chip had a lot of great advice for other marketing and growth leaders and what they should pay attention to in the next year. He thinks that a lot of times a business loses sight of the customer and the reason why their business exists. Therefore, Chip urges people to just go back to the simplest thing and think of their customers, and keeping the audience engaged.
The things that your customers needed a year ago are very different from what they need now and Chip believes it may shift again. You need to keep asking the question on what they need and how you can give it to them. Chip stated that nothing matters if you aren’t solving a key problem for your audience. By really asking those hard questions, it’s going to dictate how you move forward and provide you with the answers on what products and services to present.
Data Review
Like most marketers, Chip has a way to review data but in a different way to most. Instead of just focusing on metrics, he’s constantly asking his clients about what questions they’re asking their customers. He pushes his clients to go for the most qualified answers and delving deeper into those. Chip believes you need to make sure you’re asking the right things and then questioning your assumptions. Therefore, he’s always curious to know what his clients are thinking of and what they’re asking, so he can help them even further.
As we wrapped up the interview with Chip, he provided us with some extra insights to focus on in the next year. He thinks it’s very important to identify your revenue streams. The ones you had a year ago may not exist now so you need to constantly reassess by identifying six potential revenue streams and build a plan for that. Not all six may be useful but you’ll identify them and find the most profitable way to serve customers and help rebuild your business model.
